Sunday, November 8, 2015

Class Size Matters Testimony on the need to fundamentally revamp the Common Core and aligned exams

credit: Katie Lapham

Below is the testimony that my assistant, Miho, gave on behalf of Class Size Matters at the Cuomo Common Core Task Force listening tour in Queens on Friday. I have also posted the statements of Nancy Cauthen and Fred Smith. For an account of this hearing, as well as her testimony, see Katie Lapham's blog, Critical Classrooms. See also Nancy Cauthen's blog, the Daily News and Perdido St. blog, which features descriptions of the Task Force hearings in the rest of the state as well.

It appears that outside NYC, the testimony on the Common Core has been overwhelmingly negative, as the poll numbers indicate , with voters two-to- one saying the standards have worsened education in the state. In NYC, though testimony was more evenly divided, the pro-Common Core witnesses appeared to have been primarily hired guns from astroturf organizations funded by the Gates and Walton Foundations, including Educators for Excellence, Students First and High Achievement NY. UPDATE: see also how sadly, this NYC 2nd grader at a DOE event said that the purpose of reading books is to do better on tests -- more evidence of how the Common Core high-stakes regimen is undermining the joy of reading.

Testimony of Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters

On the need to revamp the Common Core

November
6, 2015

Thank
you for the opportunity to speak to you today.My name is Miho Watabe; and I am giving this testimony on behalf of
Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters, a citywide advocacy
group devoted to providing information on the benefits of smaller classes to
parents and others nationwide.

As
you will surely hear from many people today, the Common Core exams and cut
scores are inherently faulty, unreliable and designed to show that the vast
majority of students across the state are failing, when they are not.The NYS Education Department has not been
able to design a consistent, reliable state exam in at least a decade.The Pineapple question, which we were the
first to expose on the 2012 state exam, is only the most obvious of the
ridiculous, ambiguous and often overly abstruse questions selected for these
exams. [1]
First we had years of purposeful test score inflation, and now we have had
years of purposeful test score deflation.The cut scores were devised to align with a combined score of 1630 on the SAT, instead of the 1550 mark which the College Board
itself has stated indicates college readiness.[2]

Why
was the Common Core designed to show the vast majority of US students and
schools as failing? As the conservative commentator, Rick Hess, has explained,
it was designed to facilitate the imposition of the corporate reform agenda of
charter schools, and test-based teacher evaluation; to which I would add,
online learning and the outsourcing of education more generally into private
hands:

“First, politicians will actually embrace the
Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest
huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community
members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment
results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same
folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the
validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different
this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and
voters will embrace "reform." However, most of today's proffered
remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move
"effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and
school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the
things that suburban parents are most concerned about.[3]

The
Common Core standards themselves were developed in a secretive process by
representatives drawn mostly from the big testing corporations, with only one
classroom teacher on the math committee, and not a single teacher on ELA
committee. [4] And this lack of teaching
experience shows.

Three
aspects of the ELA Common Core are especially defective.As I’m sure you have heard, they are
developmentally inappropriate for children in the early grades.In addition, the quotas for assigning
informational text -- 50% in grades K-3 and 70% thereafter --are absurd, with
absolutely no backing in research and potentially very harmful, requiring
teachers to strip novels and plays from the curriculum.There are many studies to show that reading
literature is critical for children’s cognitive development, theory of mind and
empathic abilities. [5]

Finally,
I don’t know of any English teacher who believes in the “close reading”
strategies that the Common Core insists on, in which the teacher cannot provide
any context or background knowledge for the material that is assigned, and the
student is not allowed to relate the readings to his or her own experience.It is a technique that is designed to drain
all life, relevance and interest from the experience of reading into something
dry, purposeless and purely academic. [6]If one tried hard to devise a method to
destroy the love of reading in students, one could not do better than quotas
for informational text and the “close reading” dogma.

We
urge the Commission to take a good hard look at the Common Core’s unnatural and
unsupported informational text quotas and “close reading” strategies, and
delete them.